Friday, 14 June 2013

Jimmy Fallon has all the best ideas.

Or his writers do, I don't know, however it works. Obviously looking up old US talk-show clips on youtube isn't all I've
been doing with my evenings (and afternoons*) but - you know how it is -
the mind gets into a groove, you work evenings, mostly, and you've
moved again so there's loads of conveniently out-of-the-way stuff in
boxes to once again find less convenient places for and you feel at home
finally but you've become so used to feeling displaced and so YES... I
have been watching quite a bit of Jimmy Fallon AS IT HAPPENS.

The scope for unchecked, sloppy fun paradoxically afforded by the industrial-scale demands of a nightly American talk-show (as opposed to its weekly UK counterpart) is a contradiction I first fell for back watching The Larry Sanders Show nearly twenty years ago, long before youtube gave me access to the less fictional snippets of Conan, Jay, Letterman, Kimmell and Craig Ferguson (Craig Ferguson?!) which I now sort-of-I-guess-enjoy, but my enthusiasm for the theatrical and even pastoral responsibilities of the nightly hour-long telly treadmill has remained undimmed and chipper. John Oliver has of course just taken over hosting duties on The Daily Show, I know, and yay! - but the political focus and consequence of that particular gig make it a bad example of what I'm trying to talk about here. This is what I'm talking about:

This is Jimmy Fallon. Until recently I knew him only as the corpsing drummer in that Will Ferrell sketch where Christopher Walken says "More Cow Bell" (good luck finding that online) but the more familiar I become with Fallon's talent the more convinced I am it's really Fallon's frivolity which turned More Cow Bell into something loved enough to gets its own T-shirt. His attention to the whole is seemingly instinctive, his care over detail is on a par with CERN's, and he has an ear and an eye unmatched by anyone else I can think of working in studio-based television. Take the sketch above: two boards are wheeled on, a filter's applied and suddenly we're in a movie - that's your joke, that's Love, that's Art. Seriously. Or when he plays Neil Young singing the them tune to "Fresh Prince" and is absolutely in it, it's the shadow cast by the hat over his eyes that means someone somewhere involved in this is a meticulous genius...

Or Steve Martin punching Death in the face, here...

Or the decision not to prerecord these twenties inserts, here...

Or everything about this even though I've no idea who Michael McDonald is...

I'm reminded of The Muppet Show, but with better jokes, or what Adam Buxton might make if he was given his own talk show, or indeed anything. Have you half an hour still spare? Join me.